Starring in A Farce, A Monster Becomes A Hero

Published on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 by the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

Starring in A Farce, A Monster Becomes A Hero The US acted in self-defense when it condemned Saddam to a chaotic courtroom.

by Gwynne Dyer

It is easy to tell the difference between the trial of Saddam Hussein and the Nuremberg tribunal. That was a grave and dignified affair; Saddam's trial is more like a French farce, with a large and confusing cast of characters who rush onto the stage to deliver a few lines and then vanish again. But it's a pretty black comedy: seven people associated with the trial, including two defence lawyers, have been assassinated since it began on October 19, and another defence lawyer has fled Iraq in fear of his life. The court has been in session for only eight days since October, and the last day was the worst yet. The new chief judge, Raouf Abdel-Rahman, took over last Sunday with a heavy hand. Within an hour he had one of the defendants, Saddam's brother-in-law Barzan al-Tikriti, ejected from the court for complaining about his health care (he has cancer), and then expelled his lawyer, as well. When the other defence lawyers walked out in sympathy, the chief judge ruled that they would not be allowed back and appointed different lawyers to conduct the defence. And when Saddam rejected those court-appointed lawyers and made to leave, he was physically restrained by the guards - and then the judge ordered him to leave. It's hard to muster any sympathy for the old tyrant, but the courtroom is a zoo. The former U.S. attorney-general Ramsay Clark has called the trial "lawless". It is on its third chief judge, the first having resigned two weeks ago because of official criticism he was being too meticulous about Saddam's rights; the second having effectively been fired after a few days when it came out he was a former Baathist. The new chief judge certainly does not have that problem. In fact, Abdel-Rahman is a Kurd from Halabja, where Saddam is accused of having killed thousands of people in a poison-gas attack in 1988. It's a bit like having a concentration-camp survivor as chief judge at Nuremberg - poetic justice, perhaps, but liable to generate considerable doubts about the fairness and impartiality of the court. However, Saddam is not being tried for the atrocity at Halabja, nor indeed for any other crime that the world had heard about before this trial: the aggression against Iran, for example, or the slaughter of the Shias who responded to George Bush snr's summons to revolt at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. Those topics are off-limits because, in one way or another, they implicate the US in his crimes. Instead, he is being tried for the torture and execution of 148 people, whom he suspected of being involved in an assassination attempt against him, in the village of Dujail in 1982. In theory, he might be tried later for some of his larger crimes, but that won't happen in practice because the new Iraqi law decrees that all appeals must be completed and a death sentence carried out within 30 days of the accused being found guilty. "We'll give him a fair trial and then we'll hang him," as they used to say in old western movies. Saddam has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Iranians and others over 35 years, so a great many people want to see him hang - but the bit about the "fair trial" is necessary, and he simply isn't getting one. Why not? For the same reason the leading Nazi figures who survived the war could not have got a fair trial in a German court in 1946. Most of the German professionals who might have served in such a court were ineligible because they had collaborated in some way during the years of Nazi rule, and anti-Nazi resisters, mostly recently returned from exile, would not have had much credibility sitting in judgement on their former tormentors. It had to be an international court, and therefore the crimes also had to be international: not just killing Germans, but waging aggressive war and committing genocide. It would have been possible to try Saddam and his companions before an international court, too. In fact, it would have been a lot easier than it was in 1945, since there are now many precedents for such a court. But an international court would need to have tried Saddam on charges of waging aggressive war (against Iran and Kuwait) and pursuing a policy of genocide (against the Kurds), which would have brought up all sorts of awkward history from the days when the US and Saddam were effectively allies. So, from Washington's point of view, Saddam had to be tried in an Iraqi court. Given the chaotic incompetence of the Iraqi regime created by the occupation forces, the ludicrous spectacle unfolding before our eyes in the courtroom in Baghdad then became inevitable. Abdel-Rahman and his fellow judges will find Saddam guilty, no doubt, and they will hang him as fast as possible. But the court is accomplishing the improbable feat of turning this monster of a man into a hero and a martyr in the eyes of many people across the Arab world, and even in Iraq itself. Gwynne Dyer's book, Future: Tense: the Coming World Order, is published next week by Scribe.